I have my share of OKC stories, and indeed the app of today is vastly inferior than the app of years past.
What exists of OKC now is a "free" system which is utterly useless. You simply must pay to do anything that might result in a date.
This problem isn't the marginal user. The problem is the ever-growing marketing push to dangle "FREE" in front of people to lure them in, when of course there is cost later. In the case of OKC, the cost is your time at first. Then eventually you may pay (what is frankly an exhorbitant rate per month) just to be able to communicate with anyone.
Back to the point though. Think of all the garbage free apps for phones. Think of all the absurd games they play to trick or goad you into paying. That whole process IS the experience moreso than whatever the theoretical purpose of the app was. Instead of the old concept of "here's what we offer, and here's what it costs to get", we have this current state of the world.
There is a solution to all this: sell your product from day one. Do the traditional show and tell marketing to illustrate your product's value so you might gain customers. This is far better than the (VC?) approach of gathering users at a big loss and then figuring out how to monetize them. As we know, some of the monetization methods are evil...
What exists of OKC now is a "free" system which is utterly useless. You simply must pay to do anything that might result in a date.
This problem isn't the marginal user. The problem is the ever-growing marketing push to dangle "FREE" in front of people to lure them in, when of course there is cost later. In the case of OKC, the cost is your time at first. Then eventually you may pay (what is frankly an exhorbitant rate per month) just to be able to communicate with anyone.
Back to the point though. Think of all the garbage free apps for phones. Think of all the absurd games they play to trick or goad you into paying. That whole process IS the experience moreso than whatever the theoretical purpose of the app was. Instead of the old concept of "here's what we offer, and here's what it costs to get", we have this current state of the world.
There is a solution to all this: sell your product from day one. Do the traditional show and tell marketing to illustrate your product's value so you might gain customers. This is far better than the (VC?) approach of gathering users at a big loss and then figuring out how to monetize them. As we know, some of the monetization methods are evil...